Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 25

New publisher confirms Gorogoa and What Remains of Edith Finch for spring 2017

It’s good news time: two of Kill Screen‘s most anticipated games have signed up to a new publisher and have been confirmed for arrival in spring 2017. Those games are the visual-art puzzle game Gorogoa and the haunting short story collection What Remains of Edith Finch.

More on those two games in a sec, but first, who is this new publisher? It’s called Annapurna Interactive, a new division of the Hollywood-based production company Annapurna Pictures—who are behind films like Her (2013), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and this year’s Sausage Party—which will be dedicated to producing and publishing videogames. We’re told that Annapurna Interactive’s focus will be to collaborate on “personal, emotional, and original games that push the boundaries of interactive content and encourage artists to bring new visions to the medium.”

“personal, emotional, and original games”

These first two videogame sign-ups would certainly attest to that. But just to bring the point home, Annapurna Interactive has also revealed that it will be working with Funomena—the current home of Katamari Damacy (2004) creator Keita Takahashi—and Mountains, a studio that was recently founded by Ken Wong, the lead designer on mobile game wonder Monument Valley (2014).

No names have been issued as to who is on the team at Annapurna Interactive but we do know it includes people who have worked on Journey (2012), God of War, Mortal Kombat, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), Flower (2009), and Fat Princess (2009). A decent mix, and having people who previously showed up at thatgamecompany and The Chinese Room once again supporting the studio’s mission.

Now, on to giving you a brief on those first two Annapurna Interactive signings, if you’re not already familiar with them. Gorogoa is a hand-illustrated puzzle game by visual artist Jason Roberts. It splits the screen up into a grid comprised of tiles that each act as windows into the game’s fantastic world. Led by your curiosity and intuition, the idea is to rearrange these tiles by moving them next to or on top of each other. However, you can also enter these tiles to affect the illustrated worlds inside, playing with simple and joyful interactions. To progress, you’ll need to not only arrange the composition of each individual tile but to discover the connections between them. Gorogoa was previously slated for PC, iOS, and Android but is only listed for PC and iOS on Annapurna Interactive’s website.

What Remains of Edith Finch, on the other hand, is the next game from Giant Sparrow, whose first game The Unfinished Swan (2012) you may have played. Played from the first-person perspective, you follow the titular Edith Finch as she goes back through her family history to find out why she’s the last Finch alive. The stories range from the 1900s up until present day and are said to be as varied as the eccentric characters themselves. Each story ends with that character’s death and, together, aim to capture what it’s like to be “humbled and astonished by the vast and unknowable world around us.” Annapurna Interactive has listed What Remains of Edith Finch for PlayStation 4 and PC.

You can find out more about Annapurna Interactive and the games under its wing on its website.

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A quick look at the landscape art of The Signal From Tölva

For most players, The Signal From Tölva will be a game about shooting robots and acquiring a range of whirring-and-whistling mechanical guns to do it with. But for some it might also function as an explorable gallery of sci-fi landscapes (just like No Man’s Sky has for some)—sparse wastelands, dingy hazard zones, and alien meadows. This is at least true for its creators at British game studio Big Robot, and especially its creative director Jim Rossignol, who I was told had spent hours carefully considering the placement of rocks in the game at the Eurogamer Expo back in September.

Agonizing over the precise topography of a virtual world is something Big Robot committed to for The Signal From Tölva from the start. After having learned the ways of procedural generation for the marshes and murky villages of their first game, the “tweedpunk” stealth-shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted (2013), this time the team “wanted to break that down and do something more crafted, both for us and for the player,” according to Rossignol.

“Those prosthetic landscapes!”

This approach has enabled Rossignol to indulge in his pleasure for landscape art, whether it’s sci-fi themed, conjured from our modern world or the past, or photos or paintings. Rossignol told me that landscapes and their depiction is a theme he believes is particularly well served by videogames, picking out the Arma, PlanetSide, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series as primary representatives for this argument. “Those prosthetic landscapes!” he said. “A friend of mine once said that ‘PC games are all about terrain’ and I feel like I am an exemplar of that interest. I love terrain within games and I feel like one day I’ll make a walking simulator that is just hiking through incredible landscapes.”

The Signal From Tölva isn’t quite that, being focused on dynamic combat between warring factions of robots, but there’s an element of that fascination with the sublime and bucolic throughout. Most obviously, it can be seen in the “crashed spaceships, dead robots, and weird machines” scattered throughout Tölva‘s world, which is part of an underlying motif that Rossignol called “huge thing abandoned in remote place.” But the game is also more widely rooted in his interest in landscapes, as evidenced by the original name for the game, “Highlands.” That title was born out of Rossignol’s study of highlands and mountainscapes from around the world, used for mood boards that informed the early artwork of the game.

“I would have been even more cryptic if I thought I could get away with it”

“Ian McQue—who did some concept work for us—is also influenced by this and he shared with me his photography from the Isle Of Skye in Scotland,” Rossignol said. “It was his aesthetic that really led the look and tone of Tölva, and so I was trying to do that justice and also get across the flavor of these places. It’s actually ended up being a little soft and lusher than I’d originally intended—a trip to Iceland left me wanting black, barren rock for miles upon miles—but ultimately it has its own identity which has probably got away from any single vision we had.”

Concept art for The Signal From Tölva

While Big Robot is able to let the world of The Signal From Tölva do more of the storytelling than Sir, You Are Being Hunted‘s might have, it is still only slight. For the most part, the story is still told through media, such as text logs and data that appears when scanning the world, plus there’s a remote character called the Broker (who hasn’t been talked about much) who explains things to the player. Outside of the game, there will be a free novella written by Cass Khaw and a lorebook, both of which give more insight into Tölva‘s world for those who want it.

As to what narrative exposition is available in the game, Rossignol said it fits his preference for videogame storytelling, but added: “I would have been even more cryptic if I thought I could get away with it. Regardless, I like games not being what they seem, or just being weird in some unexplained away. Games are often far too literal, and unable to be the metaphors they should be.” The landscapes of The Signal From Tölva aren’t really meant to hide secrets and contain layers for players to ease out with curious steps. They’re worth paying attention to, of course, but its language is closer to bold punctuation than allegorical prose. As Rossignol put it: “These are big spaces, with big objects in them.”

Even so, the topography is something every player will have to consider, using their binoculars to mark distant enemies, and then drawing up a plan of attack—whether to charge in for up-close firefights and use rocks for cover, or to sit further back and employ the help of allied robots for long-distance battles. The landscapes haven’t been constructed with any specific tactics for each location in mind; Rossignol described the approach as “incidental,” letting situations emerge with the dynamic AI and for players to make use of their surroundings to adapt to it with their own choice of tactics.

You can find out more about The Signal From Tölva on its website. It’s coming out for PC in 2017.

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Rearrange a world of typography in unWorded

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unWorded (iOS)
BY BENTO STUDIO

A hospitalized writer reflects on his life with the strange tales he has read and written over the years. This is the premise narrative puzzle game unWorded. It’s set in a world made of letters, which immediately draws comparison to Type:Rider and DEVICE 6, but it’s only an interest in typography that connects them. unWorded’s unique task is in creating pictures out of letters and punctuation. As the writer reads books from his past, you might have to piece together parenthesis and the letter ‘I’ to create a palm tree, or a series of slanted letters to form the shape of a gun. It’s a reflection of the writer’s obsession: seeing worlds inside letters, piecing together words to create striking images.

Perfect for: Writers, daydreamers, Claude Garamond

Playtime: An hour

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The key to pleasant online game communities? Get rid of chat

Today, Might and Delight rolled out the first of many updates for its “online fable experience” Meadow, in which players roam and survive an open wilderness as various animals. The update added a new playable fox, a “Home” feature that lets you set any location as your animal’s home, new emotes for each animal, and new music. Larger updates are planned and will be released on December 15th and January 18th.

Meadow is the first online game that Might and Delight has made after specializing in single player games like side-scrolling platformer Pid and badger survival game Shelter. The studio’s Vic Bassey told me they were encouraged to make an online-only game after fans persistently asked for online components to their previous games. Meadow was meant as an experiment to test out the studio’s networking capabilities, but it has proven to be much more than that. “We roped in a friend of the studio for help and decided to release the game as cheaply as possible so as to reward fans of the franchise that have stuck by us,” Bassey told me. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive and given us the determination to find other ways of showing our fans how much we appreciate their support.”

“You simply had to trust your instincts”

What particularly struck me about Meadow is the idea of it being a “forum in games clothing.” Bassey told me the concept is something Might and Delight’s creative team came up with, neatly capturing the studio’s desire to make an online experience that is a “pre-dominantly relaxing affair” but also differed greatly from the “normal perception of what an MMO should be.” It’s not the first online game of its kind, as it falls under the lineage of Tale of Tales’s 2005 online multiplayer game The Endless Forest, and thatgamecompany’s 2012 multiplayer adventure Journey.

The vital design choice found in all three of these games is that players can only communicate with emotes—either a gesture or sound emitted by the in-game character. In terms of Meadow, this restriction “meant you had no way of knowing if any animal you encountered in the world was hostile or not,” according to Bassey. “You simply had to trust your instincts. There is no chat functionality and no way of knowing who the person you have interacted with is. It’s led to some pretty touching and heart warming encounters.”

The major difference here when compared to other online multiplayer games is that players only have positive ways to interact and affect each other. A game that allows for either text or voice chat (or both) opens up the possibility for players to verbally abuse each other. And as they can’t see the consequences of their harassment in their victim’s facial expressions—a crucial visual cue that helps us build empathy for others—the ramifications of hurtful words aren’t fed back to the abuser. This is why a lot of online games are known for having toxic communities with players that are constantly insulting each other. This is only exacerbated in competitive games where frustration can be increased rapidly and hostility is encouraged.

The idea of an online game that doesn’t allow chat being a “forum” might be odd at first. But by observing the players of these games you can see that conversation is actually much more worthwhile and dynamic than many other games that do have chat facilities. I asked Bassey if there were any memorable player interactions that he’s seen take place in Meadow so far, and what he shared is a great demonstration of how the game’s approach to online communication turns out positive results.

“The one that really resonated with me was one of an individual who claimed to have made more friends in three days playing the game than in their whole life,” Bassey said. “That shows the level of emotional attachment and connection that has resonated with those playing the game. The Shelter games always hit home, but Meadow appears to have gone straight for the heart. That is very much a testament to the excellent sense of community that we have tried to foster.”

You can purchase Meadow for yourself over on Steam.

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A videogame about surveillance that’s designed to be hacked

The popularity of hacking fantasies today has more in common with a legend like Robin Hood than what might be immediately apparent. In both cases, one of society’s underdogs has found a way to cheat the systems upheld by authorities and turn them on their head—either through stealing money or hacking into computers. The technology and techniques have changed over the years but not the underlying desire. It’s only one strand of evidence that suggests cheating is an integral part of the human condition. This is something that Damien, the disabled dad and husband behind Sheffield-based game studio Ninja in A Tux, knows very well.

“Since birth my left hand had no fingers, just four tiny nodules of skin for fingers and a thumb stump with a little bone but no movement,” Damien told me. His right hand was fully developed when he was born but is now held together with pins due to an accident. Luckily, he still has full use of his right hand, but his left hand remains very limited as to what it can do. That’s not to say it’s completely useless. “This stumpy half left thumb however allows me to press one key at a time on a keyboard or control the left analogue stick, and has been my gateway into gaming since I started,” he said.

“I had to adapt or just avoid playing certain games but it never stops me trying”

For the most part, Damien is able to use standard game controllers to play games, but he does use macros to modify computer mice and voice commands to assist him. These are a few of the ‘cheats’ he has had to develop over the years in order to play videogames. “Growing up in the 80s and 90s there wasn’t anything like Special Effect to help disabled kids play games, so I had to adapt or just avoid playing certain games but it never stops me trying,” Damien told me. He’s applied that same determination to other passions of his too, including graphic design, art and web development, and music production.

It was the 2005 PC racing game GTR that led him down the path of making his own games. Damien started making mods for GTR and spent the next six years dedicating some of his time towards this pursuit. What put a stop to it wasn’t a disinterest but rather the opposite—he wanted to make his own games. He started out with GameMaker, later expanding his toolset to include other game engines such as RenPy and Unity3D, at which time the hobby had become a more serious part of his life. It wasn’t long until it steered his path in a new direction. “I left my job in IT for a major bank, partly because you needed a lack [of] morals to work there, partly because it was depressing, and partly because I wanted to follow my passion for games,” Damien said. “I went back to university to study computer science and design.” This didn’t last long, however, as Damien quit in the second year of the course due to family life and the responsibilities that come with it taking over.

But he didn’t stop making videogames as he found it to be the “perfect escapism” and a productive way to spend his time. What really drove him was being able to set a number of challenging goals related to becoming better and more advanced at game development, and then chasing them down. “When I was making music I wanted to release my own MP3s, then vinyl, then an album,” he said. “It’s kind of the same with games, my first game was a simple platformer and my current game: Drones, The Human Condition is a complex layer cake of secrets and methods to hide those secrets.”

“The secrets add another dimension to the game which some people may not ever see”

Drones, The Human Condition is a twin-stick shooter primarily about surveillance and set in a futuristic Orwellian dystopia. But it’s also much more than that even if it isn’t obvious at first blush. Damien has taken his understanding of the human instinct, which encourages us to cheat when we are met with limitations, and created a hidden narrative for those who act on their curiosity. “I like to think that everything within a game is there for a reason, adding detail or setting the scene or adding to the story without narrative,” Damien said. “The secrets add another dimension to the game which some people may not ever see but I also knew that at some point somebody would delve into parts of the game they shouldn’t, people use programs to cheat or remove DRM or whatever.”

Damien’s assumptions of player behavior here seem to have been backed up before Drones has even been released on Steam: someone has already pirated it. It’s an appropriate thing to have happened to a game that is meant to be hacked into to find hidden messages, passwords, and a whole separate part of its narrative. Having hidden content like this is becoming a more common aspect of videogames these days, with the likes of Fez and the revelations and secrets of its black monolith, and the satanic imagery hidden inside the soundtrack to this year’s Doom. But Damien has perhaps made the most relevant use of this kind of digital mystery making as it feeds directly into the theme’s of his game. Drones, The Human Condition is not only about surveillance, but also corruption, modern-day slavery, Earth’s depleting resources, and the general public’s lack of awareness on all these topics.

If you want to start peeling away the layers then you should pay attention to the binary code at the game’s start …

You can purchase Drones, The Human Condition on itch.io and Steam. Find more of Ninja in A Tux’s games on its website.

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A Normal Lost Phone aims to find the personal stories in our digital lives

If you’re trying to reach as many people as possible with a game it makes sense that you use an interface they’re already familiar with. Rather than requiring players to learn the ins-and-outs of a new interface it’s probably easier to use one that already exists in their daily life. This is part of the reasoning why Accidental Queens, a three-woman team based in France, chose to give players a convincing recreation of a smartphone to interact with their story in A Normal Lost Phone.

The idea in the game is to explore a teenager’s life through their mobile phone, digging through the secrets left behind across apps, text messages, and photo galleries. In the process, the game touches on topics including coming of age, homophobia, depression, and the perpetual search for oneself. “Real people have real problems,” said Diane Landais, one of the co-founders of Accidental Queens, “we wanted these to be a part of our game.”

“It’s just not a story that can be told, nor is it a story that can be seen”

This is why she reasons that using a smartphone as an interface was also “unavoidable.” The interface could have been a laptop, a social network account, or an email inbox; what mattered was tapping into the instincts we have built in us as modern people to delve into these everyday interfaces. With that combination of intuition and curosity, Accidental Queens is able to embed a story into the digital space and trust the player to dig it out. That there’s a story in there to be found at all also feels realistic according to Landais. “Every phone tells a story, the story of its owner,” she said. “It’s just not a story that can be told, nor is it a story that can be seen. It’s narrated by whoever gets access to the phone, and is shaped by the way this person sees the world, by their habits or prejudices.”

Accidental Queens isn’t the first to see the storytelling potential in digital interfaces. In fact, the team was inspired by designers who paved the way such as Nina Freeman and Christine Love, who both explore what Landais refers to as the “digital life as a narrative medium.” A couple of Freeman’s games that fit into this idea are Cibele, which explores a relationship through an online multiplayer game, and Freshman Year, which recounts a night of abuse through a smartphone. Love’s games, including Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, use computer interfaces and emails to unfold dark mysteries about transhumanism, politics, and cosplay.

It’d be amiss to not mention the recently released Sara is Missing too, which is essentially a modern adaptation of the found-footage horror film, but replaces the camcorder with a smartphone. It’s not an inspiration for A Normal Lost Phone given that it came out several months after the original prototype was made and released as part of the Global Game Jam 2016 this past January. But it goes to show that there’s a growing interest in telling stories through the digital interfaces that surround us.

it is “something we don’t see often enough in games”

Landais has a theory as to why that might be the case. Other than the familiarity and realism these interfaces can provide, Landais credits them for allowing designers to explore the various identities of a character: we can see how they interact with friends, with family, with strangers online. “Talking about important, personal topics lets us create a complex and intricate landscape of emotions and interactions between the characters, a perfect setting for a narrative-exploration-investigation game,” she told me.

It’s one of these personal topics, one of the main aspects of the character’s life, that A Normal Lost Phone really leans into. Saying what it is would spoil the game, but suffice to say that, for Accidental Queens, it is “something we don’t see often enough in games, something we took as our duty to explain and portray as best as we could.”

Accidental Queens are currently still working on A Normal Lost Phone with a few collaborators, turning the game jam prototype into a bigger experience that should be out in early 2017. Compared to the prototype it’ll have new puzzles, new apps, a bigger narrative, a visual overhaul, an original soundtrack, and will be translated into several languages.

You can find out more about A Normal Lost Phone and pre-order it on its website. It’ll be available on smartphones and PC.

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Tech Heroes Save Old Game Worlds from Extinction

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel .

When game servers are turned off, massively multiplayer online communities can come crashing down. Now, however, fans can take matters into their own hands using technologies like cloud computing.

The YouTuber A. Kaiser’s career as a Jedi would soon be over. He had played the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) Star Wars Galaxies (2003) for eight years. Now that the game was closing, he could think of no better way to spend his final day in the world than among friends.

A flock of players were standing around in Tatooine, no longer fighting or crafting Jedi cloaks but waiting for Sony to shut off the server, their digital home for the last few years. The mood was generally optimistic. But somewhere a Wookie was screaming. Then suddenly and without warning, the connection dropped and Star Wars Galaxies was officially dead. But, unofficially, the battle for Star Wars Galaxies had just begun.

One of the bitter realities of current-day gaming is that games can die and be lost forever. MMOs, and other games played over the internet, are particularly prone to this phenomena because publishers tend to pull the plug when the games wane in popularity in order to save money. Dedicated players, however, are taking it upon themselves to revive their favorite games to their former glory.

“The effort is immeasurable,” said Doug Rush, the lead developer on Project SWGEmu, a near-exact facsimile of the original Star Wars Galaxies—only it’s fan-created and controlled. “Our project is all volunteers. Our expenses are paid with donations. It takes a love for the game to keep it running.” The enormous task of resurrecting an expansive multiplayer game keeps important gaming history alive. And while server deaths are sure to continue, the tools available to help fans preserve them will only improve as well.

Rush used to play Star Wars Galaxies with his kids and, once the world ended, he found it impossible to replace that fundamental bonding time with anything else. That’s why he vowed to bring it back. Eight years later, their newly reborn version of the game surged in popularity, averaging around 1,500 players a day. This is not the first time people have put in a massive amount of energy to save an online place from falling by the wayside. “It speaks to the deeper impact of games—how they can affect people’s lives,” said Josh Bancroft, Community Manager at Intel. “You can say games are just entertainment or fun. But for a lot of players, especially of online games, it means being a member of a tribe.”

Resurrecting an expansive multiplayer game keeps important gaming history alive

The team behind UO Second Age, for instance, are devoted to recreating the original Ultima Online (1997) the way it was played in 1998. The first version of the game was characterized by cutthroat rules, where players’ houses could be robbed or they could get jumped by bandits. But when an expansion changed much of this, the UO Second Age project set out to ensure that the harshness of the original was preserved.

This trend of saving digital worlds happens outside of games as well. Digital art non-profit Rhizome launched the GeoCities archive project and made a valiant effort to save a terabyte of early web culture, like Backstreet Boys fan pages and famous ASCII art web-rings, by relocating them to Tumblr. Dragan Espenschied of Rhizome said she’s impressed with the resourcefulness of these Geocities artists. “They didn’t have digital cameras or scanners,” Espenschied explained. “They had Notepad [the simple text editor], and they managed to make something. For me, that’s the treasure of preserving Geocities.”

To Star Wars Galaxies fans, no amount of effort was too great. “It takes an incredible amount of part-time engineering work to revive a game,” said Eric Kaltman in the Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report, a paper for the Library of Congress. “They have reverse engineered the code and created a fake version of the server in order to make the game work.”

For the most part, the process takes a painstaking level of attention to detail and research. MMO revivers spend countless hours on YouTube, looking up the precise values for hit points and abilities. It’s the digital equivalent of looking at photographs of your childhood home and rebuilding it brick by brick. To make preservation easier, Alex Handy, the director of the MADE videogame museum, advocates for game publishers releasing their source code for older online games. This way, fans can quickly set up and run their own servers, thus future-proofing online games against virtual extinction.

In the meantime, however, Bancroft said that the technology to make preservation possible is better than ever, thanks to cloud computing. “A great way to position these old servers for preservations is to translate them from physical hardware into virtual servers that run on an elastic cloud infrastructure,” he said. Elastic cloud computing services like Amazon EC2, for example, allow people to rent then add more computing performance and storage to meet growing needs. Handy is finding out he more ancient the game, the more difficult the task becomes. He is heading up a revival project for Habitat, the first MMO ever released. It came out in 1986 and was played over a dial-up service for Commodore 64.

People told Handy that reviving it was impossible

People told Handy that reviving it was impossible. First, he had to track down an original Stratus Technologies Nimbus server — a large clunky piece of computer equipment from the ’80s that didn’t exist anymore. Handy contacted an original Stratus employee, Paul Green, to construct a new one for him.

Handy is now waiting to receive libraries of code so that the revived game can communicate with the server. Without that, figuring out what the platform is trying to tell the server is like translating a dead language. But Handy isn’t the type to quit. “Once the server is up and running,” he said, “we will bring the game back online.”

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Introducing DISTANT, a game about saving dreamscapes from destruction

Many words can be used to describe last year’s endless snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure, but the one that stands out for me is flow. This encompassed the curves and angles of its snowdrifts, its wordless storytelling, and how smoothly it reset you to the top of its mountain once you fell. It was a game in harmony with itself, perfecting the loop that most mobile games aim to persuade their players to get caught up in, but giving you beautiful Peruvian horizons to admire rather than stooping to tiring exchanges of virtual currency and statistics.

I was delighted, then, when Ryan Cash of Built By Snowman (creators of Alto’s Adventure) told me that one of the next games he’s working on “focuses on the elegance of movement.” Announced today, the game is to be called DISTANT, and has so far been confirmed for Windows, Mac, consoles, and Apple TV.

“a wondrous voyage through pastel dreamscapes”

In simple terms, it’s a platformer, but it’s the kind of game that is being made to transcend the standardizing labels of genres, as is demonstrated by the full description that Cash gave me: “DISTANT takes you on a wondrous voyage through pastel dreamscapes, to prevent a calamity from consuming the world you once knew. Along the way, you’ll confront an inescapable past, and learn how much you’re willing to sacrifice in your search for solace.” The teaser trailer released today shows a cloaked character jumping across a large gap between two rocky plinths in a dark cavern. By themselves, this figure would not make the leap, but they appear to be aided by some mystical force, which propels them in mid-air as if they had been shot out of a cannon.

Alongside the trailer, I was able to see the first screenshots of the game, which acted as a showreel of the game’s environments: towering peaks, moonlit shores, vibrant meadows, cavernous labyrinths. They were idyllic shots with a keen sense of space and color, the skies punctured by an eclipse, and with faint wisps of wind inviting lift over steep and deadly drops. First impressions is that it’s striving to be elegant, reserved, evoking grandiosity through the impression of epic landscapes and the visual journey across them.

Everything about DISTANT makes it look like a logical follow-up to Alto’s Adventure. But it’s not really that at all, as it’s originally the work of new Australian independent studio Slingshot and Satchel, who started making the game with no tie to Alto’s Adventure at all. Cash and his team at Built By Snowman are acting as publisher and creative partner here, as announced back in July this year, helping to get the word out and advise during the game’s production.

The name Slingshot and Satchel refers to “the staple items you need to embark on a new journey.” That’s what the studio represents for its founders, engaged couple Chris Wearing and Megan Campbell, who left their previous positions at a Perth-based game studio, put some of their money together, and vouched to create more impactful games together. At that point, the scary bit was done—making the leap from a secure position to founding a studio—but the hard part had only just started: making their maiden game.

“That feeling of searching for home and trying to satiate the desire to belong”

As they worked on several small ideas to get them started, Wearing and Campbell realized that they all shared a focus on fluid movement juxtaposed against tight controls. “Exploring that juxtaposition between fluidity and precision led us to contemplate notions of the link between beauty and decay, which led to the seeds of DISTANT,” Wearing said. The original title for the game was “Hiraeth,” which is a Welsh word without a direct English translation that encompasses homesickness and grief for things that have been lost. “That feeling of searching for home and trying to satiate the desire to belong is something that has very much guided the development of DISTANT‘s story,” Campbell said.

You can see a little of how this direction has guided DISTANT in the trailer and screenshots, which all contain a glowing pyramid. In the trailer, that pyramid emits an invisible energy and causes plant life to grow around it, which suggests it has restorative powers. It seems to be the object of the figure’s desire as they leap towards it, suggesting that these pyramids are what you journey to collect, and perhaps in doing so are able to revive a decaying landscape, restoring it to beauty.

Wearing and Campbell aren’t confirming that this is the case yet, and aren’t giving too much more away than what they’ve shown, but they did take the time to describe how DISTANT to similar games. “Without giving too much away, DISTANT is our attempt to take a meaningful pause and reexamine what aspects of traditional genres like platformers might be walled off unnecessarily,” Wearing said. “To marry traditionally disparate concepts like ‘zen play’ and tight, satisfying challenge and explore a tonal space where they might not be so mutually exclusive after all.”

For more, you’ll have to keep an eye out on DISTANT‘s website as it’s gradually updated to reveal more of the game.

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Wunderdoktor has the most bizarre illnesses to show you

In 2014, German game maker Konstantin Kopka released a small game about “looking beneath the surface of serious medical conditions” called Wunderheilung. It had you diagnosing both a bird-person and a strange gentleman with a magnifying glass, searching for the symptoms of their maladies, and then curing them with your cursor. What stuck out about the game is how it used a mundane job to offer a window into its bizarre world.

Made in only 48 hours, the slew of positive attention that Wunderheilung managed to attract took Kopka by surprise, and it encouraged him to turn it into a bigger project. Now he’s working on Wunderdoktor, which is essentially the same game expanded with more patients, illnesses, and a proper narrative to unfold as you dish out cures. Having teamed up with his illustrator and animator sister Elenor Kopka to form the studio Ghostbutter, Kopka’s current aim is to make an experience that’ll last between two to four hours with some hidden content to find that can potentially lengthen the playtime.

a coal-mining dog with a case of “Arachnocough”

Kopka describes Wunderdoktor as a “mix between frantic Wario Ware minigames, a road movie (riding a train), and a Tom Waits song.” You play as a doctor who is assigned to a train that is mysteriously full of ill people. You’ll steadily see to each passenger, looking to cure their illness against the time limit, and hoping not to accidentally kill them in the process, which will “have grave consequences.” The wider story involves trying to find out why you’re on this train in the first place and why all these ill people are on board.

While working on the game, Kopka has been able to draw inspiration from his experience working in a hospital, as well as stint as a painter who studied traditional painting and drawing. “I find the topic of quackery, unusual diseases and the history of medicine in general super fascinating and that has been driving the development of Wunderdoktor so far,” Kopka told me, “although I guess I’m taking some liberties on what actually constitutes an illness the more you progress in the game.”

The illnesses shown off so far on the game’s development blog include an eel living inside a shark’s body, a coal-mining dog with a case of “Arachnocough” (coughing up spiders), and face shrinkage. As with the original prototype, you’ll also be popping pimples and detecting diseases, as well as cleaning skin and slicing flesh with scalpels. It’s often gross and morbid but the scrappy crayon-like art makes it delightfully lighthearted in spite of this. “My goal is to make something genuinely fun that feels almost arcadey but on the other hand also really weird and kind of grim and also to tell a story of transition and soul-finding in between the patients’ encounters,” Kopka said.

You can follow the development of Wunderdoktor on Ghostbutter’s blog.

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Pippin Barr’s new game brings concrete poetry to life

Concrete poetry is the method of using a poem’s shape or visual arrangement to convey meaning or, at least, to form an image relevant to the poem’s themes. A famous example is Silencio (1954) by Eugen Gomringer, which repeats the world “silencio” (silence) 14 times to form a square block with a void at its center—the block evoking ideas of silence as an oppressive tool, but the emptiness in the middle also read by some as a form of peace.

Pippin Barr uses the technique in his new Twine game Burnt Matches but expands on its utility through the use of hypertext. As with concrete poetry, Barr uses words as representative of objects found within a location, with the graphical placement of those words forming a 2D representation of that space. Certain words can be clicked on to make other words appear on the screen so, for example, each time the word “step” is clicked on in one scene, another instance of the word “step” appears below it so that together they look like a set of stairs. Words aren’t just objects, then, but boundaries and architecture; this is text as topography.

Barr originally started making Burnt Matches as part of the Deep Time Jam, which was conducted by Speculative Play project, which brings together “the critical practices of speculative design with the hands-on experience of play.” The jam started off with the participants collectively watching the 2010 documentary Into Eternity, which is about the Finnish nuclear waste facility Onkalo, and how it was designed to last for 100,000 years. “A key idea that we all latched onto was the idea of people in the ‘deep’ future encountering the facility and how you would help them to understand what it was and in particular that it is a dangerous place they should not enter,” said Barr.

“I might almost view Burnt Matches as a form of adaptation of the poem”

He wanted to make a virtual representation of Onkalo that contained computer interfaces with a language that was long lost to time, making them incomprehensible. During the jam, he only got so far as making these computer interfaces, integrating JavaScript and Twine to randomly generate them with strange unicode character patterns and animations. He continued work on the game after the jam but found himself stuck on how to incorporate the writing he wanted, which needed to evoke tone, address the player, and be descriptive. “I was eventually rescued by the idea of using text to represent the space itself, rather than to describe the space,” Barr said, “so Burnt Matches is partly about representing spaces ‘directly’ in Twine/HTML rather than representing through narrative text.”

Barr not only adapted the ideas of concrete poetry, though, but also turned poetry into concrete: at one point in the game, a corridor in the facility is repeatedly identified by its overwhelming concrete presence. It starts with the material itself—”rough concrete” and “cracked concrete”—but goes on to elicit its everlasting, oppressive qualities with lines like “the weight of concrete.” These poetic touches didn’t exist in the game at first. Barr added them later to remedy the “blank” text that he had fell back on—the language only denoted spaces rather than making an effort to express the themes of the game. T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, a past obsession of Barr’s, helped inform the changes to Burnt Matches that he sought to make.

“I ended up using both the thematic/language aspects of the poem (e.g. imagery of rock, thunder, water, hyacinths, etc.) along with the actual structure of the poem itself, which is in five parts themed around particular ‘elements’ in a way (water, thunder earth, etc.).” Near the game’s end, Barr goes so far as to recreate “The Waste Land” as a final, corrupted space for the player to enter. There, text flashes in spasm, glitches, peculiar characters appear and disappear amid a red and black backdrop alongside a cacophony of industrial noise. “In some ways I might almost view Burnt Matches as a form of adaptation of the poem into a new form, though only loosely,” Barr said.

The most powerful part of Burnt Matches for me is how clicking on some objects incites their decay. As you click on them, objects like “leaves” become “dry leaves,” then “pieces of dry leaves,” and finally “fragments of dry leaves.” Similar entropy infests “a rat’s bones,” a “dim light,” and “a shell.” For me, this degeneration through text communicates best the idea that the facility is a dangerous place, and that it only holds death within it.

You can play Burnt Matches for yourself in your browser.

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